My hand
by planet p
Summary: AU; Ron is asked on a date by...? He isn’t sure! Ron/Pansy


**My hand** by planet p

**Standard Disclaimer** Applies -- i.e. all recognisable characters belong to J. K. Rowling and Warner Bros.

**Author's Notes** Yeah, lame! Lame yeah!

* * *

**0001**

Pansy snorted into her peach soda, shaggy pudding bowl hair tied in ribbons of multiple shades of green, spotted frilly snap clips adding to the confusion.

Radmilla, whose friends called her Rada, watched Pansy for her reaction.

Pansy shook her head. "Don't be ridiculous, Bonbon!" she told the third girl, Bona.

Bona shrugged. "Not chicken are you?"

Pansy snorted ridiculously. "Fat chance!"

Rada grinned. "Go on then," she urged.

Pansy pushed her chair out with such violence that it toppled backward. She strode off, chin raised.

"There she goes, Pana the Pompous!" Bona joked.

**0002**

Ron frowned and spun around at the tap on his shoulder. The girl stood almost in his face, causing him to take several half steps backward. "Go out with me, Roonil Wazlib?"

Ron looked the girl up and down, taking in the pale complexion, emerald stud in her chin, armour rings on her fingers, cargo pants, torn coal knitted pullover, anime badges and grubby skull-and-bone canvas flats. "Um," he stammered, "okay." He had no idea who she was, but he figured she might smack him out if he refused her, and so it was in the interest of self-preservation that he agreed.

The girl grinned. "Five past three, Hogsmead Saturday. Meet me at the gates to the Shrieking Shack." She turned on her heel and strutted away, leaving a stunned Ronald Weasley in her wake, and he imagined she had asked him to meet her at the gates of Hell.

**0003**

Harry turned from the counter and shoved a bottle of Butterbeer into his best-friend's hands. The expression on Ron's face was one of shellshock. Harry grinned. "Ron?"

Ron answered with glazed eyes, his tone plain. "Mordred just asked me out and I said yes."

Harry chuckled in disbelief. "What?"

"Mordred is a man, Ronald," Hermione informed the tall freckled one, coming up beside the pair. Harry passed her a Butterbeer.

Ron blushed horribly and stalked off.

Hermione stumbled forward with a snort of laughter, clutching her mouth, and sniggered.

Ron kept right on walking.

**0004**

"I mean, I don't even know her name!" Ron burst out, glaring at the darkened wall as he lay on his side on his bed.

Harry grinned and managed to contain his amusement. "Well, hey, as long as she ain't a Hufflepuff!" he told Ron in a mock consoling voice.

Ron growled, smacking his pillow over his head, a muffled "hardy ha ha" coming from under the pillow.

**0005**

"What's this about Ron and a blind date?" Ginny, Ron's little sister, chimed, pulling up a chair at the kitchen table.

Ron stubbornly ignored the talk.

"Well," Harry explained at lengths, "it's not a blind date exactly. More of an anonymous date." Ginny snickered. "Ron has no idea who she is, he just agreed cos he was scared she might hit him," Harry went on.

Ginny dissolved into tears of laughter.

Ron stood as though to leave the table but was interrupted when Mrs. Weasley returned from the pantry and Harry and Ginny attempted to rearrange their faces into Saturday morning ambiguity. Ron glowered down at his peanut butter toast.

Mrs. Weasley smiled around the table and set about grilling some more toast.

**0006**

To his immense misfortune, Hogsmead Saturday turned out to be the Saturday proceeding the first week back.

Ron had just resolved not to go, when Hermione walked past, arm in arm with Neville Longbottom, and no doubt laughing at one of his lame jokes.

Ron ran up to his dorm, dodging Seamus, and pulled his robes off, dumping them on his bed, and pelted back out of the room. Seamus flattened himself into the wall, afraid that Ron may knock him down the stairs on his way down to the Commons.

Out in the Entrance Hall, Ron sighed, depressed. He couldn't see Hermione anywhere. Harry spotted him and strolled over. "Thought you weren't coming?"

Ron shrugged, avoiding Harry's curious gaze.

**0007**

Ron scanned around the clearing in the forest out front of the Shrieking Shack, apprehensive. The war was now at its height, and he wasn't sure he should have snuck off like that. All Hogsmead trips, limited to five times a year, were fully supervised and students were instructed to remain in their delegated groups. Harry had covered for Ron, starting a conversation with Trelawney, who adored him, allowing him to sneak off. Ron caught the scent of freshly crushed flowers and cheap muggle lollipops, and spun full circle.

Pansy Parkinson pushed a bunch of flowers into his hands, which he immediately pushed back. Pansy grinned and batted her coal black eyelashes against chalk white skin. "For me?" she giggled hysterically. "Oh thank you, Ronald!"

Ron stepped back in repellence.

Pansy looked up from the flowers clutched to her chest, dressed in cargo pants, white singlet and a tee shirt of green cotton net over this. "You look ill, pet?"

Ron regained his senses quickly and strode forward, taking her arm roughly. "With this heat, you must be thirsty. I'll buy you a soda."

Pansy grinned, flashing braces, and waved her free arm at her side, flowers dangling dismally above the earth.

**0008**

Pansy sat cross-legged on her backward chair, sipping her peach soda and vanilla ice-cream spider through a straw. Ron watched her with disgust, his own coke untouched. Pansy sung along to a Dido number playing in her head.

**0009**

"Burton's a total cow!" Pansy blurted in reference to the new Potions Mistress. She caught Ron's eyes and frowned. "Don't you think?"

Ron shrugged. "I guess."

Pansy nodded enthusiastically. "Totally!"

**0010**

"Holy shit!" Pansy dived out of her chair and dragged Ron under the table after her. Ron smacked his head painfully.

A group, teacher in the lead, trailed past, the last of the students fizzling away as they rounded the corner, headed for Honey Dukes.

Pansy snorted with laughter. "God, they are so Madeline!"

**0011**

Pansy leant against the wall, left shoe rested on the wall, reading from a quiz in one of the muggle magazines she said she liked. "A, b, or c?"

Ron huffed resignedly. "B, I guess."

Pansy mentally calculated his score, totalling up the sum of his answers, and threw herself forward, pointing out the box that described him. "Sucker!" she mouthed.

Ron shoved her away from him, her horrible snorting hurting his ears, and stalked off around the shelf. Pansy stuffed the magazine roughly back into its row and dashed after him. She snatched up a cheap plastic muggle toy, a novelty sword, and smacked him across the behind. "En garde, you scoundrel!"

Ron spun and shot her an immature look, seizing a sword himself. "So it be on your own folly, young rascal, for Excalibur is all-mighty!"

**0012**

Harry grinned and picked the snap clip out of Ron's hair, passing it to him. Ron snatched the clip off his friend and tossed it away. "Tell me you asked her name?"

Ron scowled. "She's mental! Why would I want to know her name?"

Harry chuckled. "She seems to like you," he jibed, nodding to the clip he had earlier thrown away.

Ron snorted. "Hardy ha ha!" He stomped up to bed without another word, having spotted Hermione hugging Neville goodnight over in the corner.

**0013**

Pansy sat cross-legged in a disused laboratory on the forth floor, Ron opposite. He couldn't understand how he had let her drag him all the way here without so much as a word, or how _she_ could possibly be winning at cards!

"Why'd you do it?" he asked. "Why'd you ask me out?"

Pansy presented her cards, taking up her win, and grinned. "Why not, pet?" She looked up into his face for his answer but he simply shrugged. "You're really bad at this," she told him plainly.

**0014**

Harry nudged Ron and nodded across the room to where Pansy Parkinson had fallen asleep at her desk. Ron sniggered and piffed his eraser at her. It hit her on the arm and bounced off the desk onto the floor. Pansy sat up and didn't look round. Ron rolled his eyes. So much for getting his eraser back.

**0015**

Ron woke one morning to find Harry gone. The war was closer still everyday. The second Hogsmead trip was cancelled. Ginny wrote Harry hate mail she had no intention of sending. Hermione stopped talking to Ron. It was his fault Harry had gone alone, she said, he must have done something wrong, because they had all agreed they would go together.

**0016**

Ron lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling, crunching on a bag of potato chips Pansy had brought. They discussed Potions and muggle movies they had seen. Ron had seen half of one. Pansy bet his record with an impressive twenty-three. She said she would tell him about them all, but she would only tell him one a day, and so he would never know how the other movies went if he didn't come back. Ron poked his tongue out at her and they shared an apricot bar in half.

**0017**

One night, when Ron had done particularly bad in Potions, they got drunk and went to bed together.

After that night, they did that a lot. He figured she was talking to him, which was a lot more than Hermione was doing.

**0018**

One night he fell asleep and forgot to sneak back to his own dormitory. The sun stung on his cheeks and he stumbled about horribly searching for his clothes. He opened the bureau drawer, one of Pansy's little books of muggle magic in hand, and frowned down at the little bottle in the bottom of the drawer. He left the book on the floor and tried to forget about the pills.

**0019**

The Christmas holidays came fast and Ron and Ginny found themselves back home. Ginny burnt her hate mail in the fire and wrote it all over again, staying up long hours into the morning. Ron made his sister pancakes in the morning but she slept the whole day through. He made them for desert at dinner but Ginny was too full on stew to eat any.

He sat out in the garden and watched the gnomes at their games. He did the dishes by hand every night and hummed a song he remembered Pansy singing.

**0020**

Very little news of the war reached them unadulterated. The Ministry of Magic was imposing curfews all over and the media was being censored to the point of fabrication.

Luna wrote to Ginny and told her things her father had told her.

Ron played with the flower badge Pansy had given him and decided to give it to his sister. He lied and said he had seen it in Hogsmead and just had to get it for her. Ginny hugged him and wore it everyday. They played Snakes and Ladders with their mother and Ginny read Luna's letters out loud. Mrs. Weasley laughed and worried too much.

**0021**

Pansy showed him her Disney books and played the accompanying 45s on a wind-up gramophone she said she had gotten when she was five.

**0022**

She left a week before school ended. Ron didn't know what to think, so he didn't.

Hermione cried and told him she was sorry she had been so horrible, it wasn't really his fault at all, Harry had left because he had wanted to, and no one would have been able to stop him in that instance. She hugged him and told him she was so sorry because she had been waiting for him to come to her and tell her she was wrong, to make her see reason, but he hadn't, and she realised she couldn't stand losing another friend. Ron stood numb in her hold and wondered how many had died for this stupid war. There had been no news from Harry and the Order wasn't disclosing specifics to students, no matter how responsible or trustworthy.

Graduation was loud and hurt Ron's head. He went to bed late and didn't sleep.

**0023**

The war ended much later. Harry and Ginny went camping one weekend together. Hermione visited her younger sister in Canada and Ron got a muggle job at McDonald's.

**0024**

Outside, the day was dreary, the windows streaked with rain. A little girl dressed in gumboots and a knitted sweater and mittens, sat with her gramps, kicking her legs back and forth. She chewed on her fries, staining her mittens with oil. Her grandfather was dressed all in black.

The girl came up to the counter and ordered herself a soft serve cone. She explained that her grandfather was sad because they had just been to a funeral. Her mummy was dead. She wasn't sad, she said, because her mummy had lots of friends now, and she wouldn't have to take any more pills.

Ron watched the girl walk away and knew just who she was.

**0025**

The little girl, whose name was Molly, came every weekday. She was going to school soon, she said. Her grandfather told Ron about his daughter and how she had had an inoperable brain tumour. He said he was glad it didn't hurt any longer. Molly pinned her mother's badges to her schoolbag.

**0026**

Molly's grandfather passed when she was nine and she came to live with Ron. Mrs. Weasley got him alone in the kitchen and asked him about the girl. He explained to his mother that Molly was her granddaughter, and Molly started her first year at Hogwarts. Ron sighed and hugged his daughter. His mother stood beside him on the platform. "You write me now, pet," he urged and the child nodded. Mrs. Weasley fixed her collar and sent her on her way. Ron turned to go and saw Hermione standing there watching him. He stepped up to her and took her in his arms and hugged her. "Hey you!"

Mrs. Weasley smiled and watched the train leave. The morning was quiet and the sun could only go up.


End file.
